Articles are versatile, you can use them to promote so many different things, but really they are only an avenue to get traffic to one of your own website pages. Most article directories will not let you use straight affiliate links in the resource box on your article so you have to build your own site (or you could use a Squidoo lens etc) and then have links on there to funnel people through to an affiliate offer.
This might sound like more work, but it is actually better for you. If you had affiliate links in your articles and the affiliate link structure changed, or a program closed down etc, then all your links would be useless! If you have your own site then you can just replace the offers you have on there with new ones and the traffic will still be happily coming in from your articles.
Of course, if you really want to get the most benefit from the traffic your articles send you then you can build an email list, this means you can profit from the traffic for years to come hopefully. The person who read your article before coming to your site has already read something of yours, so if your article was high quality then hopefully they will come to your site already warmed up to you as an expert on the subject they are searching about and will be more likely to buy from your site or your emails.
Now what you promote on your site… that is up to you, there are so many different ways of promoting things and different offers you can find, try things out, find something that works and then milk that as much as you can while you move into new niches and build up your existing sites.
Tomorrow we’ll look at where you can submit your articles for the best exposure.
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